If someone gave you $300 million dollars and said "Make me an awesome movie about the Green Lantern", you might think to yourself 'Ah, twice as much money as Thor and X-Men: First Class had - easy as pie!'. If you're director Martin Campbell and you've impressed everyone with movies like Edge of Darkness and Casino Royale, but secretly hate super hero movies and Hollywood producers with an insane cunning, and really want to make an expensive pile of fail, you'd have made "Green Lantern".
The short review - don't waste your money on this unless you *literally* have nothing better to do than watch paint dry. If you like comic books, or even just action movies, AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
Where to begin... I heard bad things about the movie, but I thought 'How bad could it be?'.
First things first. Ryan Reynolds. Generally known for playing slightly air-headed characters with a sense of humor and formulaic Hollywood looks. Star of fifty-two mostly forgettable movies. And this is the person you cast for a tent-pole blockbuster that is about as comedic as Schindler's List? The Green Lantern's romantic interest, Blake Lively looks good, but can only do so much with the steaming pile of dialog she's been handed. Peter Sarsgaard as the mad scientist turned-host-to-evil-from-beyond-space! does quite well as a somewhat sympathetic villain. Save Sarsgaard and Mark Strong to a lesser extent, it's a text book exercise in bad casting of middle-of-the road actors.
Second, 150 million for marketing, 150 million for production, that buys some seriously impressive CGI, right? I mean, all three Lord of the Rings movies had about 15 million less for their combined budgets and look at the CGI there. From a tragic airport field at night that resembles a ray-trace from 1983 to CGI characters with entirely humanoid features (the Guardians) that aren't even lip-syched to a monster with a face that looks like something out of a Saturday morning children's cartoon and is roughly as terrifying, it's an amateur effort all around. Then there's the Green Lantern himself - something about the human head on the CGI body looks off for the entire film, and you sit in the theater thinking about a floating head attached to a CGI body rather than an actual character.
Third, the dialog, characters and plot belong in a straight-to-DVD release. Credited writers Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg are most known for Dawson's Creek, Smallville, CSI: Miami and Bed of Roses, respectively. With an all-star team of writers like that... Oh wait. Right. Most of those are awful in terms of writing. It's almost as if someone set out to create an all-star team of the most cliched and bland writers they could get.
Super hero movies are experiencing a golden age - for the first time, CGI has gotten to the point where comic books can make the transition to the big screen and be something to actually take seriously and not just as entertainment for children. And for the most point, in no small part due to Marvell Studio's efforts - they've done so flawlessly. With a batting average far above Hollywood as a whole, a reputation for quality in an arena that has historically commanded little respect, they've succeeded far beyond the initial hopes of fans everywhere.
DC, Marvell's traditional rival in the comic book world, on the other hand, is doing their best to sink all of that to the bottom of the Mariana trench. With such efforts as Smallville and Jonah Hex, they're doing a bang-up job at that. The notable exception being RED, while not a fantastic movie, it was decidedly entertaining. The rest of their production credits read like children's entertainment. Oh wait, it is!
It all comes together like a perfect storm of fail, with DC at the helm of the SS Failboat assuring everyone that it will be a wonderful film as the viewers watch in horror as a giant wave of bad acting, horrendous plot and shambling dialog prepares to smash the entire ship to flinders. Even Ang Lee is laughing, because the title of worst big-budget comic book movie has been snatched from his grateful hands. If you don't see this film, you won't have to work to forget it. Save yourself the trouble and don't.
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